Tag Archives "magic"

And here we should re-emphasize that our concern is not with the conquest of a future, at least not that ‘temporal’ future that is generally deemed to be the future. Rather it is a question of what is future in us, that is, what is present to the same degree that all past in us is present. ….. Our sole concern must be with making manifest the future which is immanent in ourselves.
– Jean Gebser, The Ever Present Origin, p296 (italics from the book)

This last chapter is a difficult one to write. First of all, the structure of the English language, where most sentences are structured with ‘a subject doing something to an object’, has evolved based on an assumption of linear cause and effect, and cannot therefore express the complex nature of life. Such a structure is not conducive to expressing a process of mutual becoming, of collectively reaching to source and bringing forth insights as concrete action. In this chapter my task is to describe a process that is more interpenetrative and interwoven than anything we have articulated so far. Moreover, pointing to what is possible when we have established such collective inner and outer alignment is not at all common, so very hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it for yourself. You will notice me resorting to many valuable and poetic quotes from people painting more the full process.

For lack of a better term, I use the noun generativity and its adjective generative here. For me they capture the capacity or aspect of creating something novel that hasn’t existed before. Rainbow Hawk defines it as “a life-affirming response”, which is even better in my eyes, because ‘creating something novel’ still has a linear tinge to it. Similarly, ‘letting emergence happen’ presupposes a disconnect between me/us and what happens. Generativity is, to me, the full embodiment of the emergence movement that happens moment to moment, both inside and outside, all at once.

What does generativity look like? I have often tried to find images offering a visual representation of emergence or generativity, but searching for these terms on the internet returns only pictures showing transformations: typically from the caterpillar to the pupa to the butterfly. Beautiful as this is, and full of wonder, it is a process that has happened many times before along similar lines. That is not generative in the sense I have in mind here. A picture of different coloured whisps of smoke swirling together in all directions came the closest, but is still not adequate. Can we imagine stretching our identities, our collective being in the world, to resemble such swirling, fluid movements? What would that look like in our daily lives and work?

When I realised that evolution is not just about humans evolving, the insight hit me hard. Now I can say: of course the whole of life is evolving! All dimensions, all beings, no matter how solid or subtle, from rocks to angels and back. How much potential lies dormant in there? Have we even begun to envision that? And what if we truly understood and believed that the emergence of novel insights and actions were possible, and that evolution does not proceed in a straight line, but makes jumps and unexpected turns?

… the desired position is to rest in the Unmanifest and express in the Manifest, not alternately but simultaneously and by mutual implication.
– Beatrice Bruteau

Re-identification

It really seems a new cosmology, language and ways of expression are needed, which are totally beyond already existing conceptual and scientific frameworks. Even beyond the existing esoteric injunctions. – Albert Klamt

In previous versions, this chapter was named We and Future. But over time I have come to a deeper and fuller appreciation of what Thomas Hübl said so beautifully: “The future is not what is happening tomorrow, but the future is a potential we can develop into and then tomorrow is different than today.”

Thomas noticed that some people, when talking about the future, would take it as a pretext to avoid engaging with life here and now. However, engaging with potential as we see it is actually an invitation to be so present that we literally – in this and every moment – participate fully in life, in all the dimensions and layers that we have described so far. When we do this, the real intensity of life shows up. In Gebser’s words, Origin comes through. Origin, meaning (Dutch: oorsprong; German: Ursprung) the ‘primordial leap’, literally the point where things can spring forth. Then the future becomes really interesting!

This full participation in life leads us unavoidably to reconfigure our Western sense of identity. Bonnie Roy wrote: “When one takes up an intimate science with life, everything is found to be a field of relationships, both nested and open – patterns that weave in love, wonder and joy, that course as rivers in a floating sea of becoming.” (May 28, 2012 FB group?) What might it mean, what could it mean, to live as a collective and not just as an individual, “as rivers in a floating sea of becoming?” Or, as Mushin Schilling likes to say: “to live in a participatory multi-verse?”

How do we do that? ‘Doing’ not in the sense of ‘making something happen’, but in the embodiment of our daily actions. We have mentioned sourcing as one form of this embodiment. We have described collective sourcing, wholeness of knowing, right timing, the next minimal step and the powers of place… When we bring all these pieces of awareness together, all at once, what potential lies dormant there? To me it seems huge, especially if we were to engage with it in a collective, shared awareness!

One way of capturing this in a question could be: “How do we, as a collective entity, co-create with the subtle dimensions of life?” Fully understanding that we humans, too, have subtle dimensions that are not captured by our six physical senses. Again, we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of separation, with ‘me’ or ‘us’ over here, and the subtle realms, just like any other entity, over there. Think: jointly becoming! We must be careful, too, not to deceive ourselves by seeing co-creation as a hidden act to save the world. Think: witnessing! Remember the message from the Earth: “the act of witnessing amplifies my resilience.” Could we ever truly integrate all of this into our mainstream concept of ‘this is me’, or even ‘this is us’? Getting my mind around this leads to some cracking inside me, some groaning… until a re-identification settles itself deeply into my core.

Quote from participant:
I am the world, and the world is in me; the principle of One connects both if I relinquish myself. Then there is space for the field and what comes through it.
If I am not (only) a body; then what is IT that is being expressed? The energetic is so fluid, quickly to move… this re-identification has implications for the field and for the development of the field.
The asking becomes paramount, it is going to bring a possibility… the cellular structure will be changed and influence others. If I ask to be present to who I really am, then it becomes contagious!
… is it possible that it is true: that we are capable of holding the whole universe? We are it, and it is US!
The fullness of awareness is not dependent on time or process. The experience of it brings it about. – Lesley

In this re-identification, the boundaries of the ‘I’ are less fixed. Similarly, the boundaries of the ‘we’ are less fixed, as are ideas of what is possible and what not. I have come to see myself more as a uniquely coloured node that travels in different webs of meaning, meeting other nodes, co-creating new possibilities. This node doesn’t have a lot of freedom. It cannot go anywhere it wants, because it is bound in these webs of culture, family, locality and more – and also by some exciting collective potentials that are resonating within! Can we then see the groups, the teams, the organisations we are part of as specific coloured webs of encounter, that meet other webs in a wider ecosystem, constantly co-creating novel manifestations in our world?

What else is possible?

To begin with, it takes time and effort to sit in a Circle of Creation, to try to reframe the big problems of our time into questions and intentions that point to the inherent potential and opportunities they carry. What makes this difficult is the way we are pressured into a really different view of what is happening and how it happens. As a budding therapist, I learned from my mentor that each crisis is an opportunity for change. Now, this seems to be the case at the greater scale of humanity and its relation to Earth and life as a whole. This reframing of the problems of our time is similar to the re-identification just mentioned. Our cognition-heavy worldview, with its addiction to linear thinking and mental concepts, needs to give way to another worldview which is not just more integral (in a conceptual sense), but where we – literally and in our very bodies – expand to integrate more and more…

This blend of reframing and re-identification is a constant invitation to stay in a very open mode of experimentation, or better put: a mode of collective becoming. There are no best practices here, or even good ones! Only emergent practices. We live and work constantly in a vast soup of a myriad elements: a space that is consciously and intentionally held, with a shared intention and continuous collective inquiry as we move into action; a constant iterative process wherein action comes into being as it happens. There is a constant returning to connection, to presence, to source, to natural rhythm, to the world around. It is ongoing emergence, continuous collective presencing. There is not even a movement back and forth (that would still be too linear) that we do and live in the physical plane. We sense, source, act, reflect, sense, source, act… We have long given up living in our heads only. We stay firmly embodied and aligned, inside and out, in service of a potential that we sense is there and needs us to make it manifest.

In our Western world there is a strong tendency to ‘look for solutions’. In the complexity of this participatory multi-verse where we live, however, there is only this constant cycle of experimentation: sensing and trying out – again and again and again! Rather than reinventing something, or doing ‘the scaling up’ thing, we now engage with emergent practices and prototypes brought forth from within our context. We go into relationship with – no, again too linear! Better: we fully participate in the experience of staying in inquiry, sensing from source, rediscovering and re-identifying each time, and thus increasing connections all around.

The philosophical question might be: How will the formless inform the new form? To be honest: I don’t know the (philosophical) answer. But I do know that I can sense – be aware of – (more) potential present in individuals, in groups, in organisations, in cultures, in regions and in countries. Potential that is as yet untapped. And I know that others can do (or learn) that too. Deep in my bones I know for sure that the combined skill and capacity of dedicated teams to do this will be crucial in evolving our society and its governance.

If we combine this sensing in a balanced and coherent way in our teams, novel insights and actions will emerge. This also happens in the ‘real’ world – we just have to remember the unimaginable that has already occurred, like the fall of the Berlin Wall! All of a sudden, huge shifts become possible. Collective Presencing, as a practice, can support more of these breakthroughs or paradigm shifts, small and not so small. The breaking down of our old mainstream systems has by now become obvious to many. We notice, too, that the new ways of working have not yet found their form. It is as if we are in no-man’s land. We do see some signs of the new, we start to notice patterns, as if the first mushrooms are burgeoning up from the underground mycelium. When will we be aware of the whole new ecosystem, and live and work in it naturally? What is just beyond what is?

Quote of participant:I had an incredibly strong vision of a circle of women’s arms and hands accepting a new baby into the world. So this real circle of co-creation is like midwifing the new – like collective self-midwifery. We co-create a container that is then impregnated by our inquiry. And then we sit and wait the time it takes for everything to cook. Then we birth out patterns, or forms, into the world. – Helen

Is magic real?

I fully realise that I have entered ‘dangerous territory’ with this book – at least when people look at me and my writing here through the lens of the scientific materialist paradigm. From the sixties into the eighties, a new-age culture took many forms, and many people are still totally fascinated, even blinded by it. But during this period, an essential core has opened up in many people. What many have scornfully dismissed as weak-headed, fluffy, magical thinking is in fact a pre-sensing of new capacities activating in humans at this time.

Take this quote from Gebser and see it at work – collectively lived – in a group:

This is not in the sense that he or she can exercise, say, a new kind of magic power, a new mythical equipoising of polarising, or a new kind of mental superiority over persons, events, or processes. It is rather that his or her being present is in itself sufficient to effect new exfoliations and new crystallisations which could be nowhere manifest without his or her presence.
– Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p300.

One way of looking at this process is to see it as a psychological transition, for groups of humans. A transition from childhood to adulthood. A shift from a stance of individual and collective powerlessness to one of responsibility and full maturity. All the previous chapters of this book have pointed to what is real and what can be, so that we can understand that the human realm is the realm of choice. It is a matter of where we put our attention and awareness. Once you step into psychological maturity, you are free to decide how you wish to feel, and what you wish to believe. We wish to expand mental knowing into a wholeness of knowing which includes – and integrates – many different ways of knowing. What we experience as reality will flow from that – because we experience the world not as it is but as we are.

And indeed, many synchronicities are occurring. When we set a clear intention, life bends its ways to help that intention to manifest – although never in the ways that I and we have envisioned!

Quote by participant:
We have learned that there is a vibrant realm of invisible (to us) intelligence co-existing with us in this universe of ours, somehow interpenetrating our dimensions, that is just dying to be invited into our conversations, if we only think to ask and open up. As a result of opening up to co-habit with these invisible realms, I find myself now inhabiting the Kosmos in a totally different way, experiencing how truly alive everything is, and how real the seamless quantum ‘vacuum’ is – and how magic is real. All without drugs! – Helen

In one of our gatherings we started with ‘a coning’, a specific way of inviting different energies of the subtle dimension to join forces with us humans. Coning can appear like quite a rigid ritual. When I first learned about it through the books on the Perelandra Gardens, my greatest insight was that humans and subtle beings or energies each have their own role to play in the wholeness of life. Humans are the ones with the free will to decide: to choose and hold an intention. But most of us humans still hold the belief that ‘there is no alternative’ to the way we see the world now, as the neo-liberal mindset has conditioned us to accept. In the practice of Collective Presencing, while fully accepting what is, we choose to believe that far more is possible than what exists today, including where our human capacities are concerned. Equally, we accept that Origin continues to be present, that we can tap into it through sourcing and other such practices, and that in the process of collectively doing this some kind of magic can indeed happen! Referring to Clark’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Ultimately we don’t know how a true process of creation happens. How is it that carrots look like carrots everywhere in the world? How did life spring from no life? How does life enter in the conception of a baby? In the world of conings, folks mention the work of the devas and nature spirits, which I see as one way of ‘defining’ what makes creation happen – but it remains a mystery. The point I want to make is that you don’t need to believe in conings or devas to realise quite viscerally that we can be more or less aligned with these mysterious forces – whether we them Life, or Origin, or Generativity… I think all these labels are pointing to the same reality.

When we do manage to achieve a space of alignment – inner and outer, individual and collective – we are so much more coherent than most other human activity in the world as it is playing out these days. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to drop that coherence and revert to identifying with the human-made world only, this shifts our energy and, ultimately, our capacity to co-create. Over time, coherence and resonance with our shared intention are the benchmarks that we are collectively tracking, because that’s where something can come into being. So, instead of desperately trying to make things work, we go where the juice is, where the least effort is required!

Feedback from Life

Going where the juice is, checking whether it is easy (enough), while staying connected to our shared intention builds on the assumption that the world is a helpful place. To be precise: ‘the world’ – meaning the man-made world – might not always be ‘helpful’, if we view things through a short-term lens. In that case, we probably need to zoom the lens out substantially in all directions, and to allow ourselves to trust the universe, trust Life. Even in the face of so much wounding, anger, hatred and fear.

As I have repeatedly stated in previous chapters, we always start with what is. Looking the world in the eyes does indeed confront us with the damage done to both people and to the fullness of life on Earth. Engaging with potential doesn’t mean turning our heads away from what is in the ugly corners of the world. What is is always the starting point for any kind of change – otherwise we ground ourselves in a fantasy.

Every minimal, elegant step we take is a safe-fail experiment. This means that we need to constantly track what the impact is, where it resonates, what responses it elicits. As we practice, we are building a collective capacity to notice this kind of feedback from Life. Can we see that the different webs, made up of these different coloured nodes, are slightly changed by our small actions? Are we sensitive enough, together, to notice which kinds of behaviours and actions we want to amplify and which we would rather dampen? Are we receiving and registering the weak signals that point to bigger changes in the offing? Can we take in the feedback ‘as it is’, without conceptual maps or fantasies to bring it more into line with our implicit – and maybe unconscious – hopes?

If you have ever tried to untangle a snarled ball of yarn – something I love doing! – you are never really sure if the move you are making is actually helpful. And yet you need to keep going, trusting that you will make it in the end. This is the trust we need when dealing with complexity and unmanifest potential. There is no way we can plan things in advance, we just have to take one step at a time and see what happens. Again, watch out for any linearity creeping in through the back door. We are all part of that tangled skein, entangled in it but present together, using all our subtle senses to move in the direction where more of Life’s potential can manifest, moving in the creative dance to which Life – Origin – can respond.